It Was The Koenigsegg Agera RS Owner Who Proposed Top Speed Run

Last November, a on an 11-mile stretch of Nevada highway. The highway had to be shut down to all other traffic for obvious reasons. The 277.9 mph average speed in two runs was worth any inconvenience travelers may have suffered. Christian von Koenigsegg has just gone into greater detail about the record-setting run while chatting with at the Canadian International Auto Show a few days ago. As it turns out, the entire thing was not even his idea, but rather the car’s owner.

“We were just about finished building his car, and he said ‘I want to see how fast this goes.’ Well, we don’t have a track long enough to do that; I told him any test track is too short, you’d have to shut down a whole road. And he managed to do that,” von Koenigsegg explained. “So when we heard he had achieved that, we thought we’d better help out, because it’s uncharted territory, and it’s dangerous. We’ve never even driven that fast, so we wanted to be part of it, analyze it, and make sure it was done as safely as possible and that we got as much data out of it as possible.” Fortunately, it all went off without a hitch and Koenigsegg has rightly earned itself a highly coveted title the likes of Bugatti and Hennessey will surely want as well.

Koenigsegg also gained some knowledge from the experience that’s beneficial to its cars and customers alike. “We got a lot of data. For example, now every Agera RS comes with an aerodynamic setup in the software for the ride height, for the wing, for the front flaps, for the shock absorbers, that is optimal for that high speed, because we could never get to that speed. And we developed that while we were there. And while we have done testing of the wheels and tires earlier, we now know that at this high speed they’re fine. We also now know where the limits are; on one of the rounds we hit the rev limiter, so now if we want to go faster we need to raise the rev limiter. But it all showed that car does what it’s supposed to do, and our simulations were correct.”